Maggie's Plan movie review & film summary (2016)

Miller offers a vivid snapshot of a niche segment of New York, however. She truly gets the city’s rhythms and idiosyncrasies, and her dialogue frequently sparkles. Her characters are self-serious academics who offer compliments like: “Nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do.” But she also finds room for quirky Brooklyn hipsters, including a self-titled “pickle entrepreneur” who would fit in just fine among the ironic Williamsburg crowd in Baumbach’s “While We’re Young.”

Baumbach’s muse and frequent collaborator, Greta Gerwig, also gives the film a feeling of familiarity as the title character. We’ve seen her play a version of Maggie many times before; it is her bread and butter. Maggie is guileless and enthusiastic—one sharp-tongued character aptly describes her as “a little bit stupid”—which gives a purity to her fumbling attempts toward maturity and stability.

Maggie works at The New School in an administrative position, as “a bridge between art and commerce,” as she puts it. She’s hopelessly single but yearns to have a child, so she procures a sample of sperm from an old college friend (a likably low-key Travis Fimmel), a math whiz and pickle-maker who’s gentlemanly enough to offer to provide it the old-fashioned way. (She politely declines.)

But Maggie becomes more emotionally entangled with the brilliant professor John Harding (Ethan Hawke), a renowned expert in the field of “ficto-critical anthropology” and a struggling novelist. She agrees to read his book—a thinly-veiled depiction of his unhappy life with his even more brilliant wife, eccentric Danish academic Georgette (Julianne Moore), with whom he has two kids—and she falls in love with it. In turn, John falls in love with Maggie—although he’s probably just in love with the way she makes him feel in comparison to his actual spouse, who’s chilly and intimidating.

With her tight top knot and comically thick accent, Moore at first seems to be doing a spoof of a self-serious European intellectual. But because she can’t help but be excellent and provide insight into every character she plays, Moore reveals a vulnerability to Georgette that’s surprisingly compelling. This is especially true in her scenes with Gerwig. The two actresses have vastly different on-screen personae—Moore is all complex technique, Gerwig is all surface instinct—but together, they create a connection that’s unexpectedly pleasing and warm.